Band teardown reveals the heart of Microsoft’s smartwatch

Smartwatches and fitness trackers like the Microsoft Band can provide all kinds of insights about your daily activities… but how do they do it? A complete teardown seems like a good place to start.

If there’s anything the geeky crew at Sparkfun enjoys as much as building a new electronic gizmo, it’s ripping one apart. And just because there are plenty of folks waiting for Microsoft to restock their website so they can purchase a band doesn’t mean Sparkfun felt the least bit bad about dissecting one in the name of science.

There’s a surprising amount of hardware packed into the Band’s relatively small package. At its core lies a Freescale Kinetis K24 processor — a low-power 32-bit chip based on ARM’s Cortex-M4F architecture. Freescale produces a number of different Kinetis chips, aimed at everything from in-vehicle infotainment systems to high-tech measurement equipment. With clock speeds ranging from 50 to 180MHz, the K series Kinetis is built for performance; not the same kind of performance as the Snapdragon 400 in LG’s G Watch, but it and other Android Wear watches are very different from the Band.

The Band also sports 2MB of RAM, and 64MB of internal storage (both megs, not gigs). It might not seem like much, but it’s more than enough muscle to drive the 320 x 106 pixel display, GPS, integrated sensors, and Atheros Bluetooth module.

How do you keep a smartwatch relatively slim while making sure that it’s also got plenty of endurance? By sneaking in a pair of lithium-polymer batteries instead of a single one. The cells sit on either side of the Band’s magnetic clasp and each one packs about a day’s worth of juice.

One important takeaway from Sparkfun’s Band teardown: you probably don’t want to crack yours open. Any time the steps in a teardown includes “cut/tear,” there’s a good chance the gadget in question isn’t going to go back together neatly.